Article excerpt

The novelist Rawi Hage has a socio-political vision that he expresses realistically and also in symbolic terms. His fiction drops the reader into a space where abstractions take on solid form and allegory coexists with the allegorised--as if George Orwell had created a human community to accompany the animal one that represents it. The author of a novel set in his native Beirut, De Niro's Game (an allusion, by way of The Deer Hunter, to Russian roulette), and another set in his adopted home of Montreal, Cockroach (immigrant life through a Kafka-tinted lens), Hage has opted this time for an imaginary setting, an English-speaking city that hosts a large annual carnival. But rather than him having, for instance, a carnival standing in for a multi-ethnic melting pot, we get both sides of the equation. The narrator, Fly, explains: "There is no better place for an exile to hide ... than among a horde of humans in masks re-enacting the periodic cycles of life and death." It's a burst of clarity on an already clear topic, delivered towards the end of a novel that feels louchely opaque and guarded about its intentions.

Perhaps as a joke, Hage has given his loose narrative a formal architecture. The curtain-raising announcement of Act I is followed by these opening words: "I was conceived on the circus trail by a traveller who owned a camel and a mother who swung from the ropes"--though what follows could be nobody's idea of a confession or apologia. Instead, the book flits between slice-of-life impressions and a sense of crisis. A plot of sorts materialises from nowhere at the end of Act II and then disappears for most of Act III, before returning in a rush of incident as extreme as the earlier digressive casualness.

Hage's prose is stark in tone but verbally busy, importing imagery from every direction and discipline. Named after the class of taxi driver to which he belongs ("flies" roam the streets where "spiders" wait to be despatched), the narrator refers to the taxi he drives as "my boat", "my airplane", "my home" and "my library" and sees the people around him in terms both nationalistic (a Turkish receptionist is easy to bribe because that's how things went in the Ottoman empire) and atavistic (Fly's customers are "owls" and "hyenas" and "nocturnal apes"; human beings are "talking apes"). Numerous vocabularies angle to impose an underestablished significance. The result is about as bleak as fiction can get and still be whimsical.

Except for the occasional unexpected visit from a beleaguered friend, Fly's social life is confined to cafe chit-chat--this is heightened reality with more than its share of the mundane--and his only ritual is masturbating daily to historical visions in which he prevents the occurrence of some genocidal or imperial atrocity. Until he gets involved in low-level crime (and then without relish), he is in essence a pair of eyeballs on wheels--eyeballs unusually given to glazing over with boredom and popping with anger and contempt. The city's topography is blandly nonspecific ("Main Street", "the highway", "the market", "the bridge") and Fly's picture of urban unease trades not in capitalised nouns or landmarks you can put into Google but in artfully flattened stereotypes of recognisable phenomena. At a hospital, he comes upon "a faint chaos ... of doctors disguised in aprons, pointing magic wands at nurses in angelic uniforms and muffled tap shoes, waving bandages mistaken for egg rolls". Out on the road, he notes "the parade of teenage boys driving with hands that dangle in the manner of caged animals, their menacing eyes scouring the long thighs above spiked heels". Men who work out are "inflated balloons with broken cords, always walking as if they are taking their first step on the moon". These are tickling comic formulae but it is hard to determine their implications for Hage's project.

On the whole, Hage does without any form of governing logic, but an undertone becomes steadily more audible: the superiority of secular knowledge to nationalist and religious dogma. …

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Herizons, Vol. 13, No. 4, March 2000